Firefighting Operations Command inaugurated

Foto: MORH / J. Kopi

The field part of the inter-departmental Exercise “Sigurnost 18”, conducted in Dalmatia from 15 – 17 May 201,8, featured a visit by the representatives of the government bodies and the media to the new Firefighter Operations Command at Divulje.

“The Firefighting Operations Command at Divulje was a necessity for the Firefighter Season 2018 – the orders have to be issued at the very spot, not in Zagreb. The Command comprises all elements of the Homeland Security System and it should enter the service in ten days, to have all updated information at its disposal to enable timely and right decisions regarding the engagement and formation of the forces and the management in the field“, said the Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Damir Krstičević.

“Unlike last year, we will now be able to use all resources at our disposal. We earlier depended on the often conflicting information due to the subjectivity of their sources, and the Centre will provide the real information from the spot“, said the Minister of the Interior Davor Božinović.

The Director of the National Protection and Rescue Directorate Dragan Lozančić recommended an opening of a centre of the kind in Zagreb too; the Operations Command at Divulje will be used for crisis management throughout the Adriatic area, and for the training of the national forces. “The Centre is a result of the lessons learned from 2017, regarding the need for a unified image to make right decisions“.

“The national Firefighter Operations Command at Divulje will surely be highly useful and I trust that the Firefighter Season 2018 will be more successful than the last season“, said the Firefighter Commander of the Šibenik-Knin County Darko Dukić, who presented the Command.

The staff of the Firefighter Operations Command demonstrated a real-time transfer of imagery from the Exercise location at Kistanje, displaying rescue and treatment of the casualties of an train accident in a hardly accessible terrain.

Among the observers of the field part of the Exercise was the Minister of the Interior of the Republic of Slovakia Denisa Sakova, as the Exercise engaged a Slovakian firefighter module, “extinguishing“ a fire in the village of Muć, one of the locations in the Exercise.

The observers also visited the Situations Centre and saw the equipment installed to display all relevant real-time information.

“We need trained personnel and the technology as well! The information from the field will be received here, and will be processed by members of the Armed Forces, Police, Firefighter Service and others, and will suggest the decision to the firefighter to implement on the spot“, said the Commander of the Operations Command of the General Staff of the Croatian Armed Forces, Brig.Gen. Krešo Tuškan.

“The Firefighter Operations Command has been concieved as a situations centre, where heads of various command segments operate. It engages various services alongiside the firefighter service, and this is where the information coming in from the field will be collected and analysed“, said the Deputy Chief Firefighter Commander Željko Sutlar.

The objective of the Exercise is to check the responsibilities of the government bodies resulting from the legislation establishing them, to test the crisis management system, communications and the co-ordination withing the Homeland Security System as well as the standard operations procedures and to practice the crisis communications and information. Also, we aimed at testing the communications and information system and the capabilities of the Firefighting Operations Command and real-time transfer of imagery from the crisis spots to the Command and to establish a crisis response sequence and the development of the Homeland Security System components.